An ogre’s worth five minutes. Demons are ten. Double that if you’re working with two people; triple it for three. Multiply it by six if you want a horde. Increase the total exponentially if you want blood and bile and pus. The only limit is imagination, and Viy has enough for everyone. He can give you anything, anything at all. He can give you wolves and zombies and ghosts and goblins, and he can give you rape and murder and necrophilia. He can give you disgust and pain, revulsion the likes of which you’ve never felt before, creeping up your belly and settling putrid and warm in your guts, but the price is steep and he pays it all.
Here. Have your baby rising out of its cradle. Watch it come at you with its bright baby smile and big baby eyes. Gather it up in your arms, your lovely mother arms, cradle it to your chest like it’s all you care about in the world. Then feel its head grow large and disfigured, and feel its teeth bury into your breast and then burrow, feel its mouth grab onto your heart and eat it, eat it right there. See your heart, your beating heart, your only heart—see it locked in your baby’s jaws, see your precious baby boy lick the blood from his lips and then smile up at you with all the love in the world. Wake up screaming.
That one’s worth three hours.
Another night. Dip your feet into a bowl of warm water. Feel the cares of daily monotony melt away. Relax. Then watch locusts erupt from its depths, watch them eat into your flesh, feel them fill up your organs and eat your stomach from the inside out. Wake up drenched in sweat. Spend the next two weeks squashing every bug you see.
That one’s two.
Vampires, gnomes, bestiality, amputation, decapitation, cannibalism, surgery with no anesthesia, arachnophobia, agoraphobia, erotophobia, every horror the earth has ever known, slipped inside your mind like a kiss, like love. Like the whispers of your mother-father-sister-brother, on dark nights when you’ve just woken from a nightmare and they crawl into bed beside you and say “It’s alright, it’s alright.”
Here. Have a nightmare.
The total will come to half a night’s sleep. Viy will pay it.
“There’s a formula,” Viy tells Gabriel, as he sits on his bed. His hands sweep through the air, draw patterns and arcs and ellipses. From the ends, tiny phantasms emerge: here, a giant bat, blood dripping from its fangs; there, a withered corpse wearing the face of your loved ones. “You just have to twist it a bit. Not a lot, or it’ll get ridiculous. Just a bit.”
He sweeps his hands through the air, and looks up at Gabriel with guileless eyes.
“You start with a fantasy. With something pretty and pure.”
His hands draw a girl, a beautiful, lovely girl. Her hair is gold, and her eyes are blue. She wears a white dress, and her face is a doll’s. She is six inches tall, and she flutters around Viy’s head like a cherub.
Gabriel looks at her with his large, broad smile and extends a hand. She takes it in tiny fingers and presses a kiss to the palm. Gabriel watches Viy, and Viy bows his head.
“Then you twist it. Just a little bit. Just slightly-”—the girl’s legs shatter and break—
“—and then again, just a little bit more—”
—and her eyes turn to pus and drip down her face—
“—and once more, just once more—”
—and her belly erupts with maggots, and her insides steam and shake.
Viy looks down. His hands are clasped in his lap, and his shoulders tremble. He’s still a boy. Just a frail, fragile little boy, who sees into your mind and picks apart your fears and then injects them into you like a hallucinogenic. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t know how to stop.
Gabriel stares down at Viy with his broad smile and says “You’re getting very good at this,” and Viy looks up at him with wide eyes and pink cheeks and says “Yes.”
You’d think the Nightmare King would look more imposing than he does. The last one was. The last one was everything we could have asked for in someone called the Lord of Sleep. Tall and dark and Gothic, with wide shoulders and a portrait that hung in the castle over a fireplace and a sword. He didn’t need to pry you open with night terrors to make you writhe; he could do a well enough job all on his own. All he had to do was look at you. All he had to do was stare.
Viy’s different. Viy’s a boy.
Viy is eight years old, small for his age, and he’s never had a full night’s sleep in his life.
He has no idea who he really is. No millennium-old castle for him; Viy lives in the slums, and every night he takes a walk.
You’ll see him. You can’t help but see him. See Viy, with his delicate hands and his long fingers, pianists’ fingers, calloused at the ends where he digs them into the rough walls of his bedroom every night. His eyes are large, and the circles underneath are even larger. He has a small nose and badly cut hair, and his face has every pedophile in Reverie after him, cornering him, whispering filthy things into his tiny ears, because Reverie’s a city where you can get away with that.
They don’t touch him. They’ve tried. They’ve all tried. But Viy is the Nightmare King, and no one can touch him. Try all you want. Go ahead. You know you want to. Look at that face. Just look at that angel’s face.
Look at that face, and reach for him.
When you open your eyes, the world will be very different, and you will have no place in it. Maybe you’ll survive. Maybe you won’t.
Viy will lie awake at night and think of you, and he’ll reach out with his mind, and he’ll wonder.
It’s an old story.
Once upon a time a king died, and there was no one left who could equal him.
There was a war. There’s always a war. This one was just a bit worse than most, and the people got the worst of it, as they always do.
Now the rulers live in the castle. The rest live in Reverie, like rats. That’s all anyone is, if they live in Reverie: putrid, overgrown rats. Cannibalistic, violent, with their fights and their fucks and their parasitism, leeching off each other, eating of each other, taking all that’s good in the world and polluting it, because this is Reverie and you can get away with it.
Gabriel lives in Reverie. So does Viy. But Viy will one day be the Nightmare King, and Gabriel will be the ruler of all the world has ever known, and on the wings of perversion and pestilence they’ll ride and ride, until the world is theirs and their city is nothing but a page of a burnt book.
They’re going to change the world. They’re going to save the world. That’s what Gabriel has told him, and Viy knows it to be true.
“Close your eyes,” Gabriel says. “It’ll work better if you close your eyes.”
Viy nods, but keeps them open anyway. Gabriel sighs, smiles, and lifts a hand to cover Viy’s eyelids.
“Don’t be scared,” he says. “You do this every night. We’re just going a bit farther this time. But you need to concentrate, and you’ll concentrate better if you close your eyes. Trust me.”
“I do,” Viy says.
Gabriel’s mouth is a quiet, gentle curve. Viy can see it in his mind. “Good,” Gabriel says, and that’s the last thing Viy hears before he sends himself tumbling into nothingness.
He can feel the touch of a hundred thousand minds against his own, but he ignores them. He’s looking for one. Just one, far away, in the high rooms of a brilliant crystal castle.
He brushes against it and feels it brush back, curious and calm and blissfully asleep. He pushes. He sees dreams. Beautiful dreams, of beautiful children. The man’s children, probably; they share the same wheat-colored hair, the same big gray eyes. Their noses are the same. Their faces are the same. They run through white passages, light and happy. The man tosses a daughter up onto one broad shoulder. He slings a son up under one brawny arm. The others laugh and sing and crowd around him, calling Daddy, daddy, pick me up daddy, pick me.
They’re a family. Such a lovely family.
Gabriel bends closer. “Last week,” he whispers, voice soft and very sweet, “that man ordered the deaths of a thousand baby boys.”
Viy closes his eyes behind the warmth of Gabriel’s hand, reaches out with his mind, and cuts off the head of the man’s youngest boy.
The next day, he makes the man’s dream-self rape them.
And again, and again, and again and—
Decapitation costs him three hours. Mutilation costs him four. He gets very little sleep. But it’s all right. Gabriel stays beside him, and whispers comfort and peace, and Viy needs that more than he’ll ever need rest.
—and again and again and again—
For weeks, and weeks, and weeks, until one night he sends his mind out in search of the man’s and finds nothing.
The next day, Gabriel slips into Viy’s room and tells him that the kingdom’s second in command has committed suicide. Took a header off a minaret, he says. They were calling him crazy at the end. Plagued by nightmares, like. He almost killed his own children – said they were demons, devils, monsters trying to corrupt him. Their mother put a stop to it, locked him in a room but didn’t think to lock the windows, too. Isn’t that funny? You don’t have to worry anymore. They’re safe now. He’s dead.
Gabriel smiles at him, reaches down to ruffle his hair.
“You did well,” he says. “Every person who will live because that man is dead owes you their lives. Half of Reverie would have felt that man’s hatred and indifference. He’d have killed them for breathing the air he breathed. You saved them. You saved us all.”
Gabriel smiles. He always smiles, so wide, so beautiful, just like an angel. He’s an angel.
“You’re a hero,” Gabriel murmurs. “My little hero. My Viy.”
Viy closes his eyes, and bows his head.
There’s a dream they share, and it works like this:
Life is terrible. But on the wings of destruction and nightmare and death, they’re going to change things. They’re going to change everything.
Viy is eight, and Gabriel is an angel, and together they’re going to change the world.